The Ranger's Sorrow: The King's Ranger Book 4

by AC Cobble

  Zaine shook her head. She seemed unable to find words to respond, so he leaned out as far as he could, looking down the line of his companions where every six paces, one of them was chained to the wall. Calb had strung up the nameless woman and Ambrose as well. It gave Rew a little pleasure seeing the sour-faced necromancer there. Ambrose looked like his favorite dog had died, assuming the necromancer had ever loved an animal. Rew cringed when he saw Anne, who was looking back at him with an accusatory glare. Rew considered whether he’d be better off with Calb or with the empath.

  Cinda was on the other side of Zaine, and when she saw Rew peering down the line, she scuffed her feet on the stone below them and said, “Was that wise? This is going to get extremely uncomfortable later this evening when we’re tired of standing.”

  “Was it wise to kill the arcanist, or—“

  “Telling him all of our secrets in the first place,” snapped Cinda. “The arcanist wouldn’t have put it together if you had kept your mouth shut. Our only advantage was secrecy and, with it, surprise.”

  “Shh,” Rew told her. “They can hear us.”

  She looked back at him incredulously.

  “Right,” said Rew, coughing slightly. “They know our biggest secret, but Calb doesn’t know all of it. He’ll be nervous and uncertain now because he realizes the ground is covered in caltrops and hidden pits. Each step he takes may put a spike of steel into his foot or cause a fall into the unknown. I bought us time.”

  “For what?”

  “We need my longsword.”

  “What are you going to do with your longsword, Ranger? Did you forget you’re currently chained to a wall? Unless you’ve a plan to free yourself, you’re not going to do much with that blade.”

  “I’m going to need it when I go after Calb,” hissed Rew, lowering his voice so only Cinda and Zaine could hear him. “I can’t face him unarmed.”

  The two girls blinked back at him as if he was a dog that had suddenly decided to talk. He thought about reminding them that the blade was enchanted, that it had properties which could help them, but there were some secrets best left unspoken.

  “We’re in the courtyard Calb uses for executing prisoners,” he told them instead. He nodded toward a nondescript doorway set in a plain stone wall to the side. “That’s the mortuary, where they keep the palace’s dead until a burial can be arranged or until the bodies are collected by family.”

  The girls’ looks did not change.

  “The forty men we saw killed in Calb’s dungeons ought to be in that building. Thirty-nine of them are going to cause a distraction. One needs to go get my sword.”

  “What in the Blessed Mother’s Grace are you talking about?” asked Zaine.

  On the other side of the thief, Cinda paled. She knew.

  “Remember the opossum,” said Rew quietly after glancing to make sure no one was overhearing them. “You were in the room when those men died. The connection is there. You’re asking them to do what I believe most of them might like to do already, if given the chance. Revenge is powerful motivation, and it was Calb who caused their deaths. You were close to death yourself, Cinda, and that familiarity will cling to you. It will help. You can do this.”

  “I-I don’t think I can.”

  “If you bind them, that fool Ambrose can command them, but we need your power to make the binding.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Then I suppose we can all stand here until Calb gets around to killing us,” growled Rew. “You thought this would be easy, that challenging the king wouldn’t require sacrifice, that it wouldn’t take all you’ve got and then some?”

  “I don’t have the—”

  “Death clings to this place, lass. It permeates the courtyard. Can’t you feel it? If you can cause a big enough distraction and collect my longsword, I can get us out of here.”

  Zaine, spluttering, said shrilly, “Hold on. Are you planning—“

  “Quiet,” instructed Rew as one of the guards approached. The ranger met Cinda’s gaze one more time. He told her, “I’ll get you started.”

  “Captain told us to make sure you weren’t talking to each other,” roared the guard, pausing a dozen steps from them. “So shut yar traps.”

  “No,” said Rew, grinning at the man.

  “Ya shut yar jaw, or I’ll come shut it for ya.”

  “Nah, you won’t.”

  “Don’t ya tell me what I will or won’t—“

  “How about I tell you what your mother did last night? Or maybe it’d be quicker if I just said what she didn’t do.”

  The guard charged, and Rew hauled himself up, pulling on the steel manacles encircling his wrists, ignoring the ache in his injured shoulder at the strain. He wrapped his legs around the guard’s neck. The man, rushing in a surge of anger, hadn’t expected the move and didn’t react in time to stop Rew.

  “Last time I did this,” Rew told the man, squeezing with his legs, “it was to one of Calb’s imps. I’ve gotta say, your breath isn’t much better.”

  The man pounded ineffectually against Rew’s thighs then tried to pry the ranger’s legs apart. Rew shifted, curling his body and wrapping the chain that hung from above around the guard’s neck. Rew dropped his legs, letting his full weight rest on the chain, crushing the other man’s throat with the steel links.

  The soldier’s eyes boggled and he flailed frantically. If he had a knife or a dagger and had thought to draw it, he might have stabbed his way free before Rew got the chain on his neck, but he didn’t. Now, he was too close to do anything but land ineffectual punches against Rew’s arms and back.

  Slowly, the man was choking to death.

  His companions raced closer then paused. The captain appeared and screeched, “Stop that!”

  Rew simply smiled around the shoulder of the dying guard and did not respond.

  The captain, evidently too nervous to approach the ranger, watched from a distance as his man died. The soldiers must have been warned about coming close to Rew and the others. Some of them clutched crossbows, but they’d either been told not to use them, or they didn’t want to hit their own man, even if he was dying.

  The guard grew still, and Rew held him until he was sure the other man was dead. Then, he unwrapped the chain and kicked the guard away before resuming his previous stance. His shoulder throbbed from being twisted above his head and carrying his weight as he’d wrapped the chain, but he could live with that pain for now. Like Anne said, if they were alive in a few days, he’d grouse about it then.

  “No food and water for you, you fool!” yelled the captain. “If it’s up to me, we’ll all stand here and watch you starve to death!”

  “It’s not up to you,” replied Rew calmly.

  The captain grasped the hilt of the broadsword hanging on his side and looked as if he was considering using it. He didn’t get the chance, though, as the door to the mortuary slammed open. All of the guards looked confused as a man shambled out of the dark room and approached one of the spellcasters.

  “King’s Sake, lass,” hissed Ambrose into the quiet of the courtyard.

  The new arrival showed injuries of a brutal attack from Calb’s imps. Its face was ravaged, half the skin on its skull hanging limply. Its color was that of curdled milk. Its motions were stilted and strange, and its eyes glowed a wicked green. It emanated hatred, and as Rew had suspected, it had a powerful thirst for revenge. The first person it reached was a spellcaster garbed in the green robes of his profession. The corpse Cinda had animated wrapped its cold fingers around the spellcaster’s neck.

  Rew, trying to pitch his voice an octave lower than usual, cried out, “Quick, they’re trying to rescue the prisoners. Get them!”

  Everyone in the courtyard was looking at the corpse attacking the spellcaster, so he hoped someone might think his voice was that of a guard. Sending the soldiers toward the open door would make it that much easier for Cinda’s animated corpses to get to them.

  More of the shambling w
retches were shuffling out into the open, and as each new one appeared, they were sent after a target. The guards were rooted in place, stunned and confused about what was happening.

  Rew wondered how many years it’d been since a necromancer had been in the Western Province with the strength to animate a corpse. Outside of the Fedgley’s line and, of course, the king himself, there couldn't have been many necromancers in the kingdom who could manage the feat.

  Rew watched in morbid fascination as more of the undead appeared from the mortuary. It occurred to him that as a son of Vaisius Morden, he was one of the only people in Vaeldon who had seen something like this before. The soldiers in Calb’s employ very well could have believed that raising the dead was a myth. To Rew’s knowledge, only the king had done it at scale over the last two hundred years, and Vaisius Morden typically left no witnesses.

  The spellcasters had known Cinda was capable of necromancy, and they should have been prepared, but like everything Rew had seen of Calb’s efforts, the prince and his men were a step behind. The prince’s people never had a chance.

  “What are you doing?” cried the guard captain, spinning and yanking his sword from the sheath.

  The captain took two steps toward Rew before the dead man at the ranger’s feet, the one Rew had choked, rose and began to grapple with his former captain. To his credit, the captain did not panic. Instead, he forced the corpse away and slammed his sword into its middle. It would have been a terrific blow, if the guard wasn’t already dead. Instead, the dead soldier tore the sword free of its own guts and, holding on to the edge of the blade, brained the frozen-in-shock captain with the hilt.

  “Don’t push me away,” called Ambrose over the tumult of the guards rushing to confront their former peers. “If you don’t fight me, I can give instructions. You deal with the other. I… That one is beyond my talent to control.”

  Cinda did not reply. She was hanging motionless from the chains, her face obscured by dark hair that hung over her limp neck. Some of the soldiers nearby glanced at the prisoners, but they didn’t understand what Ambrose was saying. Once they got over their surprise, they did understand that a company of undead was filing out into the light and attacking them, so they did what they could to defend themselves, which wasn’t much.

  Finally regaining their wits, the spellcasters began to fight back as well, and blasts of heat, cold, and electrical charges began to sizzle across the open courtyard. The corpses were mauling their brethren, impervious to further wounds from blade or crossbow, but the force of the spellcasters’ attacks shattered the slow-moving wave of undead. Bodies were engulfed in liquid fire and fell to the cobblestones, popping and sizzling. Spears of ice crashed in torrents and tore through flesh, shattering bone and dropping the undead where they could only claw their way forward with broken hands. The spellcasters advanced, pushing the undead toward the mortuary doors where presumably they hoped to seal them inside.

  Until the imp joined the fray.

  That gave even the spellcasters pause.

  The undead imp, moving more comfortably than the animated humans, charged out of the open doorway of the mortuary and immediately set on a spellcaster, tearing into the man with horrific zeal. Rew watched, impressed and appalled, as the thing flung aside the body of what had once been a man and bound after another.

  Several of Calb’s soldiers began to run away.

  Staggering out of the madness, a man, freshly dead and missing one arm, teetered toward Zaine, fumbling at his belt with a fat ring of keys. The corpse’s hand trembled, and it didn’t have the coordination to find the right key and fit it into the lock, but Zaine was able to grab the key ring. She said to Cinda, “I, ah, I can open the lock if you can get that thing out of my face. Quickly, please.”

  The corpse, mouth open, blood dripping down its side, green fire burning in its eyes, turned and sought one of its fellows who was retreating from the undead imp that was rampaging through the pack of soldiers. The key-bearer grasped the back of its fellow soldier and then smashed its forehead into the skull of the living man, battering him over and over again, cracking both of their heads in the process.

  Zaine stumbled forward, looking a bit green herself as she turned from the melee. She came to Rew and climbed up his side to where she could start trying keys in his manacles. Her weight hung on his injured shoulder. He gritted his teeth but did not complain.

  Somewhere within the palace, they heard a terrific concussion, and Rew guessed Calb had joined the fight. He frowned. Fighting what? There were dozens of undead rampaging in the courtyard, but surely none had time to get…

  Unless they’d raised more of them.

  Zaine found the right key and freed him.

  Rew called to Cinda, “I’m going to need that sword soon.”

  “It’s coming,” she hissed, not looking up. After a pause, she added, “Ranger, I think we’ve made a mistake.”

  Rubbing his wrists and working his shoulder, trying to force the ache away through will alone, Rew asked her, “How so?”

  “It’s not just the mortuary. There are… more of them. More than I can control.”

  “What? What do you mean, more of them?”

  “She’s raised half the corpses in the city,” called Ambrose from the other side of Cinda. “So far, that is. Ranger, the whole crypt has risen. There’s… there’s got to be thousands of them already coming out, and they’re not under her command. I don’t… I don’t even know how many are down below. My senses are full of them. I don’t have the strength for this, Ranger, and she doesn’t have the control.”

  “Oh. That’s not good. That’s not good at all.”

  In moments, a dead maid, with the desiccated mien of a raisin, came tottering into the courtyard. Ignoring the fury of the battle happening around her, the undead maid stumbled toward Rew, all of their weapons clutched clumsily in a bundle.

  Rew wondered where Cinda had sensed and found a long-dead maid stuffed somewhere within the palace, and still wearing her livery, but he gratefully accepted his longsword from the cold, dry hands. Zaine took her weapons as well and scowled at her quiver containing just a single arrow.

  “Well, she tried, I guess.”

  Rew grinned at the thief then instructed, “Free the others and take them to—Pfah. None of you know the palace.”

  The buildings around them rumbled as concussive blasts of high magic were unleashed inside. Calb and his other spellcasters were battling the legions of undead that had been released by Cinda’s necromancy.

  The spellcasters in the courtyard were nearly finished. Every time they struck at one of the corpses from the mortuary, more rose from the freshly killed soldiers. As long as Cinda’s and Ambrose’s strength remained, fighting the undead was a battle that could not be won. Calb would be facing much the same, except he would know that the only way to defeat an army of the undead was to slay the necromancer who had raised them.

  Fighting the corpses themselves was a fool’s errand. Calb would figure out what had happened and would be coming for them any moment. They’d have the greatest advantage near the crypt, where Cinda’s corpses could help in the fight, unless she lost control, and then…

  “King’s Sake, I’m going to need you all, and we’re safer together. Come on, let’s get them out of these chains.”

  The battle in the courtyard was finished by the time they’d freed the others. Rew instructed Raif to carry his sister. Then, the ranger shook off Ambrose as the necromancer tried to lean on his shoulder.

  “I’m nearly spent,” moaned the man. Sweat ran in rivulets down his bare scalp. He was stooped like a worker in the fields after decades of labor, and his face was twisted in fear. The older necromancer shuffled away from Cinda, like he couldn’t bring himself to touch the noblewoman. “Her strength…”

  “Can you seal the doors to the crypt?” Rew asked the nameless woman. “They ought to be similar to those in Iyre.”

  She looked uneasy but nodded. “Yes, if the doors
are the same. All adherents to the Cursed Father are taught—”

  “I know,” snapped Rew. Around them, corpses were lurching aimlessly. Rew turned to Ambrose and waved his hand around. “Can you, ah…”

  “I’ve already released them from my control, but their final instructions were to leave us alone. We’re somewhat safe,” muttered the necromancer, “from these at least. I can’t do more. I told you. I’m almost spent.”

  “You’ve got until we reach the crypt to find your spine, Ambrose. There’s going to be… King’s Sake, there’s going to be a lot of them.”

  “The crypt? She needs to release the bindings, or we need to flee the city,” warned Ambrose. He shivered. “Not the city, the province. We can’t go deeper into this morass, Ranger. It’s certain death. We can get out while they’re all distracted. Once we’re outside of the city, she can release the bindings.”

  “We’re going to the crypt, and you’re coming with us,” snapped Rew. He put a hand on Cinda, not sure if she could feel it or not. “Hold the bindings, lass. We’re going to need them a little bit longer.”

  “This is madness, Rew,” worried Anne.

  “Just wait until you hear my plan.”

  Chapter Four

  They ran through the chaotic corridors of Prince Calb’s palace, dodging soldiers that they saw but not seeing many of the palace’s other denizens. Most of the staff had wisely gone into hiding, and all of those in the halls were heavily armed. The guards were running, their eyes panicked but alert. Rew doubted any of them knew where they were running to.

  Those who did know what was going on would no longer be in the palace. If they had any sense at all, they’d be fleeing out into the city and then into the countryside beyond. One did not stand against a legion of undead with only armor and a sharp sword at your side.

  The soldiers paid little attention to a small band of people who looked to have been on the wrong end of a battle. Rew and the others weren’t the only ones traipsing through the corridors with weapons drawn, speckled with blood.